This is so true, not just in healthcare but in damn near everything.
It’s like coming out.
The heteronormative understanding is that you come out and that it, done and dusted. The reality is most of us have to come out every bloody day, sometimes multiple times a day. It’s exhausting, frustrating, and debilitating, but we hold it all in and we’re polite and generous when what we really want to do would give us life behind bars.
Why do we perform our gratitude?
To spare your heteronormative feelings. That’s why.
Today – it’s only 6.00am – I phoned my bank to tell them I’m travelling and please don’t block my credit card because of some unusual transaction you wouldn’t expect a freak like me to make from some exciting clime you’d never expect a freak ‘like me’ to be travelling to. The call centre person demanded I produce extra ID because I didn’t ‘sound like a woman’ and ‘we have to be careful.’ I did as I was asked – because that’s what we do, we’re largely a compliant lot – having first explained my gender identity and then wondered aloud if this oft discussed fact – I’ve been with my bank for 30 years – happened to be mentioned on my banking ID? She said it was, but she felt she needed to confirm this for herself.
Seriously?
How utterly professional of her, or was she just being plain nosey?
When it comes to trust, a woman, an employment lawyer who has ‘transwomen are women’ on her Twitter bio and identifies as an ally, handled a bunch of vexatious complaints about me from a person with serious ‘history’ and, despite there being not a skerrick of evidence against me, decided that I’m probably guilty as accused because … well, just because.
This proud straight, white, privileged, heterosexual ‘ally’ joined with a couple of other, white, privileged, heterosexual ciswomen, and opted to not believe a single word I said despite a total lack of evidence against me and my pristine record of working with kids. This still resonates and has resulted in a blacklisting of sorts – not official, of course, that level of courage often eludes the straight, privileged, heterosexual hétéronormatives who like their bigotry to be acted out ‘in committee’ so they can never be held to account.
Odd that at least five of those involved consider themselves to be LGBTQI+ supporters and allies but when that support might reasonably manifest itself, they abdicate their supporter role and line up on the side of the straight, privileged, mostly white, ‘normal’ people who look, sound, and act just like them – at least one of whom is seriously and provably dodgy.
So why this statement and why now?
Because I’ve been silent way too long and if I say silent any longer, I will become my own oppressor – and this bunch are long overdue a shout out and being called to account.
There’s that wise old saying ‘if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got’.
Same applies to people. If you always use those whom you’ve always used, then the results you get will be those you’ve always got. If that outcome was inertia and failure, you’d better get ready to celebrate more straight, middle class, privileged, ex-private school failure because that’s what you’ll most likely get.
But, hey, that’s all good, that’s just fine, because that failure will look and sound just like you and yours, and that’s actually what you’d prefer. Isn’t it?
Plus ça change (plus c’est la même chose).
dykiegirl 